Bookreporter.com - THE SECRET SCRIPTURE by Sebastian Barry

THE SECRET SCRIPTURE
Sebastian Barry
Viking
Fiction
ISBN: 9780670019403

Growing up in Ireland, during the Great War, golden-haired Roseanne Clear adores her Presbyterian father, Joe, a happy and curious individual who is the “cleanest man in the Christian world, all Sligo anyhow.” Her mother, Cissy, is an anxious woman who “suffers strangely under the halo of beauty.” The greatest joy of Roseanne’s young life is walking with her exotic-looking mother at dusk to meet her father on his way home from a local Catholic cemetery, where he works as superintendent.

But death arrives unannounced at the Clears’ doorstep when the Irish troubles come calling at the cemetery. After that dark and disturbing night, Roseanne’s young life, and that of her family, changes forever. Shortly afterwards, Father Gaunt, a local priest who has “no antennae for grief,” informs Joe that he is to be removed from his job at the cemetery. City officials have found Joe a new job as a rat catcher. The once proud and fastidious caretaker becomes “a living man exiled from the dead.”

Following the family’s drastic change in circumstances, her father is not the same. After his death and her mother’s descent into madness, Roseanne, who is still in her teens, tries to carve out a future for herself. She finds a job, falls in love and marries Tom McNulty, “the decentest man.” But her happiness is short-lived, as she eventually ends up in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, a place “where sisters, mothers, grandmothers, spinsters, all forgotten, lie.”

Half a century later the hospital is on the verge of collapse and slated to be torn down. Before the facility is destroyed, Dr. William Grene, the Senior Psychiatrist who has attended the hospital’s patients for more than three decades, has been called upon to assess which patients can be put back into the community and which are to be moved to a new facility. For years he has been inexplicably drawn to Mrs. McNulty, and as the time approaches for the hospital’s demolition, he searches to find the reason for her hospitalization.

During her decades in the mental institution, Roseanne has learned the virtue of silence, but she still has good eyesight and a steady hand. While Dr. Grene searches for the truth about her, Roseanne carefully documents her recollections in a manuscript that she hides under a floorboard beneath her bed. As the good doctor unravels the complicated and conflicting accounts of her life, and as she records her memories of the past, they uncover deeply buried and safely guarded secrets, while coming to realize the truth about themselves.

Roseanne, like the Ireland of her birth, is complex and flawed, yet deserving of love and grace. In spite of her dire and tangled circumstances, although neglected and forlorn, her spirit endures and hope prevails.

Acclaimed author Sebastian Barry has written an elegant and intelligent novel of love, murder, betrayal and sacrifice. It’s a thought-provoking look at the destructive power of well-intentioned people to destroy lives and the redemptive power of truth to heal, no matter how long it takes.

--- Reviewed by Donna Volkenannt (dvolkenannt@charter.net)

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